IT HAS been many years since France last had a revolution,
or even a serious attempt at reform. Stagnation, both political and economic,
has been the hallmark of a country where little has changed for decades, even
as power has rotated between the established parties of left and right.

Until now. This year’s presidential election, the most
exciting in living memory, promises an upheaval. The Socialist and Republican
parties, which have held power since the founding of the Fifth Republic in
1958, could be eliminated in the first round of a presidential ballot on April
23rd. French voters may face a choice between two insurgent candidates: Marine
Le Pen, the charismatic leader of the National Front, and Emmanuel Macron, the
upstart leader of a liberal movement, En Marche! (On the Move!), which he
founded only last year.

The implications of these insurgencies are hard to
exaggerate. They are the clearest example yet of a global trend: that the old
divide between left and right is growing less important than a new one between
open and closed. The resulting realignment will have reverberations far beyond
France’s borders. It could revitalise the European Union, or wreck it.

Les misérables

The revolution’s proximate cause is voters’ fury at the
uselessness and self-dealing of their ruling class. The Socialist president,
François Hollande, is so unpopular that he is not running for re-election. The
established opposition, the centre-right Republican party, saw its chances sink
on March 1st when its standard-bearer, François Fillon, revealed that he was
being formally investigated for paying his wife and children nearly €1m
($1.05m) of public money for allegedly fake jobs. Mr Fillon did not withdraw
from the race, despite having promised to do so. But his chances of winning are
dramatically weakened.

Further fuelling voters’ anger is their anguish at the state
of France (see article). One poll last year found that French people are the
most pessimistic on Earth, with 81% grumbling that the world is getting worse
and only 3% saying that it is getting better. Much of that gloom is economic.
France’s economy has long been sluggish; its vast state, which absorbs 57% of
GDP, has sapped the country’s vitality. A quarter of French youths are
unemployed. Of those who have jobs, few can find permanent ones of the sort
their parents enjoyed. In the face of high taxes and heavy regulation those
with entrepreneurial vim have long headed abroad, often to London. But the
malaise goes well beyond stagnant living standards. Repeated terrorist attacks
have jangled nerves, forced citizens to live under a state of emergency and
exposed deep cultural rifts in the country with Europe’s largest Muslim
community.

Many of these problems have built up over decades, but
neither the left nor the right has been able to get to grips with them.
France’s last serious attempt at ambitious economic reform, an overhaul of
pensions and social security, was in the mid-1990s under President Jacques
Chirac. It collapsed in the face of massive strikes. Since then, few have even
tried. Nicolas Sarkozy talked a big game, but his reform agenda was felled by
the financial crisis of 2007-08. Mr Hollande had a disastrous start,
introducing a 75% top tax rate. He was then too unpopular to get much done.
After decades of stasis, it is hardly surprising that French voters want to
throw the bums out.

Both Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen tap into that frustration. But
they offer radically different diagnoses of what ails France and radically
different remedies. Ms Le Pen blames outside forces and promises to protect
voters with a combination of more barriers and greater social welfare. She has
effectively distanced herself from her party’s anti-Semitic past (even evicting
her father from the party he founded), but she appeals to those who want to
shut out the rest of the world. She decries globalisation as a threat to French
jobs and Islamists as fomenters of terror who make it perilous to wear a short
skirt in public. The EU is “an anti-democratic monster”. She vows to close
radical mosques, stanch the flow of immigrants to a trickle, obstruct foreign
trade, swap the euro for a resurrected French franc and call a referendum on
leaving the EU.

Mr Macron’s instincts are the opposite. He thinks that more
openness would make France stronger. He is staunchly pro-trade,
pro-competition, pro-immigration and pro-EU. He embraces cultural change and
technological disruption. He thinks the way to get more French people working
is to reduce cumbersome labour protections, not add to them. Though he has long
been short on precise policies (he was due to publish a manifesto as The
Economist went to press), Mr Macron is pitching himself as the pro-globalisation
revolutionary.

Look carefully, and neither insurgent is a convincing
outsider. Ms Le Pen has spent her life in politics; her success has been to
make a hitherto extremist party socially acceptable. Mr Macron was Mr
Hollande’s economy minister. His liberalising programme will probably be less
bold than that of the beleaguered Mr Fillon, who has promised to trim the state
payroll by 500,000 workers and slash the labour code. Both revolutionaries
would have difficulty enacting their agendas. Even if she were to prevail, Ms
Le Pen’s party would not win a majority in the national assembly. Mr Macron
barely has a party.

La France ouverte ou la France forteresse?

Nonetheless, they represent a repudiation of the status quo.
A victory for Mr Macron would be evidence that liberalism still appeals to
Europeans. A victory for Ms Le Pen would make France poorer, more insular and
nastier. If she pulls France out of the euro, it would trigger a financial
crisis and doom a union that, for all its flaws, has promoted peace and
prosperity in Europe for six decades. Vladimir Putin would love that. It is
perhaps no coincidence that Ms Le Pen’s party has received a hefty loan from a
Russian bank and Mr Macron’s organisation has suffered more than 4,000 hacking
attacks.

With just over two months to go, it seems Ms Le Pen is
unlikely to clinch the presidency. Polls show her winning the first round but
losing the run-off. But in this extraordinary election, anything could happen.
France has shaken the world before. It could do so